Lights, Camera, Action!

Let’s face it. These days, videos and the internet go hand in hand like macaroni and cheese.

Videos make 40% of online consumer traffic, and are now a huge part of the internet with over 88 million people watching a video online (according to Marketingprofs.com).

And it’s not all about videos of people falling over, or a dog barking “I love you”. Online videos are now serious business tools with 75% of executives watching work-related videos every week.

So, being shy, not having a big enough budget or thinking that you don’t have anything interesting to film about is not an excuse anymore. It’s time to get filming!

It’s not all talk and no walk – over here at SocialGO we have just finished making our first ever case study video. Through the journey we learned many valuable lessons, which we’ll share in this blog. Enjoy

The first step is to have an idea.

There is always something you can film, chances are what you do every day is already great content for your video. We wanted to film a ‘Talking Heads’ video of clients who use SocialGO to show how we helped them, so we started with Kidstart Connect. We made sure to come up with a list of questions we wanted to ask so that we would get relevant answers for putting into a flow when editing.

After the idea comes the execution

Gather your equipment, and pick the location. Kidstart Connect is a family oriented online community, so we decided to film in the nearby playground.

We used a Nikon D7000 camera to film our client and set up a condenser mic to record the audio. However as we soon found out, recording outside comes with a lot of obstacles. Recording clear audio can be a challenge so don’t be afraid to ask your interviewee to repeat their answers if you heard background noise. It’s something we’ll definitely do in our next filming. See if you can hear the aeroplane overhead or the church bells in the distance in Veli’s interview! You can get a few tips on how to avoid background noise here.

Also, don’t be shy to ask your ‘talking head’ to repeat any sentences that didn’t come out great the first time. View the clip you just recorded and re-record any mistakes or mumbles, and make sure that sentences are ended properly before moving on to the next sentence – it makes editing so much easier.

Then comes the editing.

After your successful day of recording, it’s time to sit down and edit the video footage into a nice flow. Add interesting titles or an animation and give the video some nice background music. Make sure to choose a suitable song that fits in well and doesn’t overpower the speech, usually the general rule is to use a simple track (instrumentals without drums tend to work best). There are plenty of useful guides around to help you get your video editing workflow nailed, here’s one: Video editing tips.

After finalising the cut, compress and upload the video to YouTube and start posting it around the web.

Finally, remember to have fun!

The videos you’re making will really help give you that special edge. Share your video with us in the comments, we want to see what you came up with!